William C. Kidder (UC-Riverside) and Richard Lempert (Michigan): The Mismatch Myth in American Higher Education: A Synthesis of Empirical Evidence at the Law School and Undergraduate Levels. Cheryl E. Matias, Naomi Nishi and Roberto Montoya reviewWhiteness in Academia: Counter-stories of Betrayal and Resistance by John Preston. Is college really harder to get into than it used to be? Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media. Evan Hughes on how the Left-leaning media hopes the student debt problem is huge: The backlash against David Leonhardt's New York Times column may be unwarranted. What does the future hold for academic associations? Steven Rathgeb Smith explains. Business school, disrupted: In moving into online education, Harvard Business School discovered that it isn’t so easy to practice what it teaches. Adapt (not publish) or perish: In the near future, only very wealthy colleges will have English departments. Finally, an academic text devoted to 50 Shades of Gray: William Giraldi on what happens when a very smart scholar tries to find meaning in a very dumb book. From the Hedgehog Review’s The Infernal Machine blog, Mark Algee-Hewitt and Andrew Piper on the unpredictability of academic writing; and Chad Wellmon on #failedacademic: The new public intellectual? The new academic celebrity: Christopher Shea on why a different kind of scholar — and idea — hits big today. Jack Flanagan on how Twitter is tearing down academia's Ivory Tower. Robert T. Gonzalez on the 20 best #SixWordPaperTitle tweets.

The inaugural issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly is out, including an introduction, and a review essay on the flourishing of transgender studies by Regina Kunzel. Zack Ford on the quiet clash between transgender women and drag queens. Tiffany Xie on how mass shooters have a gender and a race. Dear reform conservatives, you're doing it wrong: Veteran of the New Democrat movement Ed Kilgore shares some advice. Black voters saved Thad Cochran and the GOP establishment — here's what Republicans owe them in return. Tyler Cowen interviews Ralph Nader, author of Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. How has Hillary Clinton been suddenly transformed into Marie Antoinette? Triumph the Insult Comic Dog watches the World Cup. The pointlessly precious politics of twee: Judy Berman reviewsTwee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film by Marc Spitz. Do PR people deserve our sympathy? Hamilton Nolan wonders. From TNR, Alec MacGillis on the unelectable whiteness of Scott Walker: A journey through the poisonous, racially divided world that produced a Republican star. Fantastically wrong: Matt Simon on the murderous plant that grows from the blood of hanged men. Deep control, death and co: John Martin Fischer interviewed by Richard Marshall. Researchers at risk in Central Asia: PhD student in political science Alexander Sodiqov has been detained in Tajikistan; his adviser explains why and what should be done to secure his release.

Kal Raustiala (UCLA) and Christopher Jon Sprigman (NYU): How Can Brands Flourish in the Knockoff Kingdom? What China Tells Us about the Bad — and Good — Effects of Luxury Goods Counterfeiting. Toby Stuart (UC-Berkeley) and Yanbo Wang (BU): Who Cooks the Books in China, and Does it Pay? Davide Cantoni (Munich), Yuyu Chen (Peking), David Yufan Yang (Stanford), Noam Yuchtman (UC-Berkeley), and Y. Jane Zhang (UST): Curriculum and Ideology (“We study the causal effect of school curricula on students’ stated beliefs and attitudes”.) Tom Rendall (Macau): “What About Their Parents?”: Teaching the Western Classics to Students in China. Manuel Perez Garcia (RUC): From Eurocentrism to Sinocentrism: The New Challenges in Global History. Solving China’s schools: Ian Johnson interviews Jiang Xueqin. How bad is China's moral crisis? Even China's 2-year-olds are manipulative nihilists. Ross Perlin reviewsHeart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk by James Carter; Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate by Ernest P. Young and The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison. Can stand-up comedy succeed in China? Some of the country's top comics are experimenting with a new brand of edgy, boundary-testing humor. James Andrew Lewis on five myths about Chinese hackers. From China Daily Show, a look at how to review a book on China. From TNR, when 0748 means “go die": Christopher Beam in the secret messages inside Chinese URLs; and meet China's Tony Robbins: The predatory gospel of China's most popular motivational speaker.